Ignatieff and the media

Yesterday, aboard the Liberal Express, we got several glimpses into Michael Ignatieff's feelings about the media.

There were, first of all, these comments, about his personal feelings toward the arts, CBC and the Canada Council. Essentially, Ignatieff  told the crowd in Kingston that his personal past is all tied up in these institutions, so they could all be reassured of his allegiance if he becomes prime minister. 

But there was another, more provocative question posed to Ignatieff yesterday as well, about how Liberals could try to regain favour with the national media. Given that my own newspaper has delivered a bit of a kick to him this morning, Ignatieff's answer is probably worth noting:

There are representatives of the national media here. I say that for a reason. It’s a waste of time in politics to blame the messenger. It is a waste of time to try to manipulate the messenger. These guys have got a job to do. ... (CTV national reporter) Roger Smith is five feet away from me here and he’s got a job to do. And we welcome him here and he can report any darn way he wants. And if I get it wrong, it’s my problem, not his problem. So let’s get out of the Harper mindset, which is: we’ve got to control this, we’ve got to spin this, we’ve got to manipulate this, we’ve got to keep them 45 miles away, we’ve got to set up a roster of which questions get asked and which can’t get asked. If the bus breaks down, we don’t tell them some story. We try to get a replacement bus and try to get them on the bus as soon as possible. And we did.  I don’t know any other way to do it, other than ‘what you see is what you get’. And you go to Canadians and you make your pitch.

Later on last evening, on the patio of the Holiday Inn in Peterborough, Ignatieff and his wife Zsuzsanna convened a dinner of reporters travelling with him. I was there, along with the National Post's John Ivison, Sun Media's Brian Lilley, The Globe and Mail's John Ibbitson and Matthew Pearson from the Ottawa Citizen.  The talk was pretty much the same kind any folks would have over dinner -- movies, books, sports and  travel were the main subjects. Scotland figured heavily into the discussions, funnily enough, because three of us have direct roots there (Ivison had just returned from a visit to his homeland) and Ignatieff's daughter has just graduated from the University of Edinburgh. Other than that, no great state secrets were revealed. If it's true that an exit strategy from politics is being contemplated, as my paper is reporting, Ignatieff gave absolutely no hint of that over dinner with the media.

Oh, and before anyone is tempted to start carping about cozy dinners between reporters  and Liberal politicians, I should note that Stephen Harper also had many social contacts with the media before he became prime minister and continues to invite reporters over for garden parties and Christmas gatherings.  If memory serves, I believe I was at a small dinner party at Harper's house only a couple of months before the 2005-06 election.

Lines of communication are open

This morning on CBC Radio One's The Current, the marquee guest was Scott McLellan, who's written a blockbuster memoir, What Happened, about many of his regrets as the former press secretary to George W. Bush.

Host Jim Brown, I'm pleased to report, brought the interview around to the subject of Canada and the type of media management we've been seeing here from the Harper government.  Brown asked whether the departure of Sandra Buckler presented an opportunity for Canada's government to rethink its tight message control.

McLellan didn't seem surprised by the question. In fact, he   gave the impression he'd answered it before, maybe many times. He said, essentially, that discipline is one thing, paranoia is another. "What you can't do is abandon candour and openness," McLellan said.

Buckler's replacement, Kory Teneycke, started on the job yesterday. He has already made it clear to members of the gallery, including yours truly, that he's interested in openness and that he doesn't believe  his only  role  is to serve as a barrier to information. That's a nice change and a promising start.

Harper, Bush now on a yo-yo basis

Please remember: This is a trained professional and no one (in Ottawa at least) should try this at home:

Long memories

Here's a riddle: What is the similarity between Prime Minister Stephen Harper throwing a football on the lawn of Parliament in 2005 and Liberal leader Stephane Dion doing the weather on CITY TV in 2008?

On immediate consideration, the answer would seem to be - nothing much.

But the Conservative spin machine sees a similarity, I guess, which explains why TWO of us at the Star have received messages from the party's HQ in the last 24 hours - asking us if we're going to write or comment on Dion's weatherman stint the same way we did about Harper throwing the football with Peter MacKay after Belinda Stronach's dramatic floor-crossing in May, 2005.

I apparently was on TV afterward in 2005, saying the Harper-MacKay stunt made me cringe (still does, actually). So Conservatives wanted to know if Dion doing the weather made me cringe too. Another of us had called the football game a PR display, so the Conservatives wanted to know if that's how he'd write about Dion doing the weather.

I'm assuming that if two of us got these messages at the Star, there are other reporters out there getting them too. In other words, they're now digging through their three-year-old records, looking for stuff said about Harper while he was in opposition - stuff that made them mad, apparently - and trying to leverage that into negative coverage of Dion.

I don't recall any political party doing this in the past - despite some Conservatives' conviction that the Liberals dictated negative media coverage of Harper, then and now. For the record, when Liberals did try to get me to write that Harper had a "secret agenda" or that he was scary in opposition, I'd usually tell them "you would say that, wouldn't you?" and tell them it was hardly front-page news that Liberals didn't like Harper. Same thing applies to Conservatives.

Buckler rides the resignation wave

Sandra Buckler, the Prime Minister's communications chief, is leaving her job. Will this change things between the PMO and the media in Harper's Ottawa? My view is, probably not much. I was never really sure what Buckler did, frankly, beyond implementing higher-ups' wishes to antagonize the parliamentary press gallery and sending out terse, non-informational emails. I'm sure they'll be able to find someone else to do that job. Ottawa is filled with folks who can follow orders.

Buckler's departure, actually, is part of a larger wave of resignations we have been seeing and are going to see in the days ahead. Many will be prompted simply by the fact that "it's time" - Buckler, chief of staff Ian Brodie, etc.

Others may be looking at next week - July 2, 2008, when the measures of the federal accountability act come into force. Why is that relevant? Because the act creates something known as "designated office holders" - ministers, ministerial staff and others - who are not allowed to lobby for five years after leaving their jobs on the Hill.

So there will be plenty of folks in Harper's Ottawa right now, envisioning a lucrative lobbying career, who may be packing up their desks as soon as  today. Never  mind that Harper once famously said: "If there are (Parliament) Hill staffers who dream of making it rich trying to lobby a future Conservative government, if that's true of any of you, you had better make different plans, or leave."

One of my colleagues, returning from the 2005  news conference where that statement was  uttered, translated it this way: "Liberals can't be trusted, but I don't trust you guys much either."

At any rate, watch for a trickle or even a flow of exits before next Wednesday. And then we can start speculating on who's going to replace all these people.

UPDATE: Garth Turner has an extensive list of what Ms. Buckler did in her job at the PMO.

I join Garth, by the way, in wishing her well in future endeavours.

Best and worst of the year in politics

Before tonight's big "At Issue" panel on CBC's The National - the season-ender, which is always great TV for political junkies - I'm wondering if readers out there have their own ideas for most overrated and underrated politician, or the best/worst moments of the past year in politics.

My vote for best moment was the Conservative-Liberal agreement on extending the mission in Afghanistan, including that press conference by the Manley panel.

The worst moment is harder to choose. There were just so many bad moments in Question Period.

PMO pushes, CTV pushes back

Yesterday, at the end of  CTV's Question Period broadcast,   there was some strong and remarkable evidence of journalists pushing back against the Prime Minister's Office.  Rather than explain the story, why don't I just put the transcript here? I would imagine we'll be hearing more about this in the days to come:

JANE TABER: Craig, we've got to address a complaint. We received a complaint from the Prime Minister's director of communications Sandra Buckler about something you said on the show about the fact the Environment Minister or the Finance Minister would not come on to talk about Dion's green plan.

CRAIG OLIVER: And it was accurate for me to say they had both turned us down. However, they did offer us Jason Kenney, the Minister of Multiculturalism, to attack the government's green plan, and we said, sorry, we're not talking about multiculturalism, we're talking about taxation or we're talking about environment. And so they're insisting that we should take their person. And the question really is who's producing the show? Are we producing the show or is the Prime Minister's office producing the show? Would somebody tell me?

TABER: I think Sandra Buckler has an idea about who's producing the show, and I think that she, when she offers someone, she expects...

OLIVER: She thinks we should take her candidate.

TABER: Exactly.

OLIVER: Any time somebody's offered by her, that's the person we should have on the show. Not somebody we choose.

TABER: And we have to say that Jason Kenney of course did appear on the show, but we spoke to him in a panel situation with other MPs about, you know, what the accomplishments of the government were.

OLIVER: And we were glad to have him.

TABER: We were very glad to have him, we're always glad to have Jason Kenney on the show. So that's the complaint, we've addressed it, and as we leave you we're going to leave with you pictures from the studio of Parliament Hill and the preparations for the July 1st celebrations. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week.

Watching for copyright reform reaction

The copyright-reform legislation has been released, at last.

For reaction, we'll watch the opposition parties of course, but Facebook is the place to go to see how this is landing at the grassroots.

A Facebook group, Fair Copyright for Canada, amassed tens of thousands of members last Christmas when the reforms were merely a rumour. As of this morning, the Facebook group has 41,670 members and there is talk on the site of doing a big invitation push today in the wake of the announcement by Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Heritage Minister Josee Verner.

The founder of this site, incidentally, is University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, who will be weighing in with his reaction in tomorrow's Star.

Things we've learned

Random things learned while reading letters to the editor in newspapers around Canada:

• One person wasn't surprised when Peter Van Loan spilled water all over Prime Minister Stephen Harper last week.

• One MP is handing out big cheques. By big, we don't mean big dollars.

• One  woman  has an answer to this season's favourite political question: Who is Canada's Barack Obama? Answer: Governor-General Michaelle Jean.

 

Signs point to copyright reform announcement

Several weeks ago, aboard the Prime Minister's plane headed to New Orleans for the "three amigos" summit, the affable and impressive Industry Minister Jim Prentice came back to chat to reporters.

He was asked about the long-awaited copyright-reform legislation, which has been rumoured to be making an appearance since last December. This is an issue of particular interest to the United States and its ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins.

Here's an interview from last December, in which Wilkins talks briefly about it.

It's also a huge issue in cyberspace and the reigning expert is Michael Geist, who columnizes in the Star. Geist reported on his blog yesterday that Government House Leader Peter Van Loan has been ordering folks to direct all correspondence on copyright reform to Prentice's office.

Obviously, something's on the way. And sure enough, one of my eagle-eyed colleagues was walking through 240 Sparks Street this morning, where the minister's office is located, and spotted people eyeing some big white signs that proclaim "Made in Canada Copyright Reform." So it seems an announcement is imminent.

And, just to further speculate, is it possible that Prentice wants to get this out of the way before he's shuffled to a more demanding portfolio? It's rumoured that Prentice is headed to something big, such as Finance or Foreign Affairs.